Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Jorge Posada Retires and Shakes Up Real Estate Portfolio

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Much to our own chagrin, Your Mama woke up much later than usual this morning, hung over like a wet blanket from all the gin, candy and late night Australian Open watching. When we finally managed to pour ourselves a cup of coffee and check out the incoming emails and news feeds we quickly found all the international property gossips squawking like wild hogs about how lauded and applauded New York Yankee Alex "A-Rod" Rodriguez has done sold a New York City condo he snatched up in March (2011) for $5,500,000 then brazenly flipped back on the market a few months later with an audacious but apparently not unrealistic eight million dollar price tag. No word on the agreed upon sale price but it was sufficiently high enough for Mister A-Rod to "lock in a significant profit" New York City real estate sources "familiar with the sale" told The Wall Street Journal.

Fascinating as Mister A-Rod's professional accomplishments, eternal parade of usually blond, typically hard-bodied and often high-profile gal pals, and fickle-seeming real estate doings may be, he ain't the only Yankee with an itch to unload a high-priced and art-filled New York City condo crib. Rather than talk trash about Mister A-Rod's almost entirely white, Warhol print filled full-floor bachelor pad on the 35 floor of the Rushmore, a towering Upper West Side condo complex that looms over the Westside Highway with sweeping Hudson River views, we've opted instead to head over to the Upper East Side where Mister A-Rod's long-time teammate Jorge Posada and his va-va-voom wife Laura have had their full floor condominium residence listed since early December 2011with a major league asking price of $11,500,000.

It was only yesterday, we learned on the interweb just this afternoon, that Mister Posada officially announced his retirement from professional
baseball, a turn of events that may or may not have something to do with him and the missus listing their deluxe and decidedly contemporary Manhattan homestead.

Believe it or not puppies, Your Mama had never even heard of Mister Posada before this morning so we did what we always do when it comes time to discuss a professional athlete: We picked up our bedraggled Princess phone and warily dialed our moody, boozy, sleep deprived and ball-obsessed b.f.f. Fiona Trambeau who when asked what she knew of Mister Posada moaned feverishly with an obvious lust in her loins and described the six-foot-two slugger in her typically lewd manner as a "Hot, uncut Cuban by way of Puerto Rico with big ears!"When we warily queried how she knew such inappropriately personal things, Fiona haughtily replied, "I just know. I can see it in his eyes." Ugh. Anyoo, Miss Trambeau eventually went on elucidate that during his 17 year career catching and batting for the Yankees Mister Posada was a god damn superstar, a five-time All-Star player who possesses a handful of chunky, diamond-encrusted World Series championship rings.

Property records suggest Mister and Missus Posada purchased and subsequently combined two adjacent mid-floor condo residences in to one mansion-sized sprawler at The Seville, a 31-story, full-service white glove condo tower that lords over a busy but fairly ordinary corner of East 77th Street and 2nd Avenue. The glassy tower offers residents round-the-clock door people, direct access to a private garage, and a state of the art fitness center complete with the requisite body torture devices, an outdoor terrace, swimming pool, spa, and sauna. We're not entirely sure when they snatched up the first piece of their hoity-toity New York City real estate puzzle but we do find clear evidence Mister and Missus Posada paid $3,600,000—or $3,500,000 depending on where one peeps—for the nearly 2,300 square foot condo next door in August 2007.

Listing information and marketing materials for the Posada's now- and rather smartly-combined 10-plus room urban oasis show it spans approximately 5,600 square feet of interior space—and 0 square feet of exterior space, offers four highly desirable exposures—those would be north, south, east and west, of course—and is currently configured with 4 bedrooms and 5 full and 2 half bathrooms.

A pre-war sized foyer serves as the gateway to the amply proportioned living and dining rooms hat anchor the outside central corner of the residence. The dining room seats 10 or more at a very glossy wood table and the rather casual "formal" living room, sheathed in a shimmering silver wall covering, has a built in entertainment center along the back wall that contains a giant flat screen tee-vee surrounded by open shelves with various multi-colored objet on display. The cluster of ancient looking statuettes on the side table next to that kooky but comfortable-looking leather Euro-recliner would have to go since we'd probably make a panicked call to the security people and/or wake up our violent tendencied (and occasionally armed) housekeeper Svetlana every time we passed by that room in the hoochy haze of a dark early morning and imagined we saw an intruder out of the corner of our eye.

The apartment makes an unusually long and powerful 80-plus sweep from the dining room in the northwestern corner of the condo clear past the suburbs-scaled kitchen, beyond the breakfast area—used by Mister and Missus Posada as a sitting room—and clear through the home office/den area tucked cozily in to the condo's sunny southwest corner. Whatever one may think of this apartment and it's lackluster location too far east to be really posh, that 80-foot long stretch is a rare and jaw-dropping thing to behold in a city where a $4,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment with 900 square feet is considered spacious.

A sybaritic, Poggenpohl kitchen has, as per listing information, a Chevy-sized center work island with long snack counter, miles of teak cabinetry, several over-sized windows with city views, and a boat load of high-grade and high-cost appliances that include twin Sub-Zero fridge-freezers. A service hall with laundry room and two separate powder poopers runs behind the kitchen and connects the front foyer to the service entrance and breakfast room that includes a wet bar (with full-height wine fridge) and opens into a convertible bedroom space used by Mister and Missus Posada as a casual home office/den built out with full wall of custom-designed open and closed shelving perfect for bong stashing and displaying knickknacks, photographs and various other paddy whacks.

Three family/guest bedrooms, each with generous closet space, huge
windows and an attached private bathroom, along with a half dozen additional closets make up the eastern flank of the
multi-winged apartment and the celebrity-style and clothes horse-accommodating master bedroom stretches back to form the west wing behind the family quarters and encompasses a private entry vestibule with closet and over-sized bedroom with additional closet space plus a built-in entertainment center with wall-mounted flat screen boob-toob. There are custom-fitted his and her dressing rooms—his dark and manly with frost glass fronted wardrobes and hers gleaming white lacquer with a glammy crystal chandelier—as well as his and her bathrooms, hers all in white with decked out hair and make-up center and his outfitted with a steam shower, wall-mounted tee-vee and walls sheathed in over-scaled chocolate brown crocodile that is more likely embossed leather than actual crocodile hide. Either way it's a hidebound pooper that could easily give an animal activist involuntary and uncontrollable fits of hysteria and peristaltic paroxysms.

With Mister Posada now retired, the Florida-based pair, who have three children, including one who grapples with craniosynotosis, no longer have a professional need to be in New York City for long periods of time. Of course we don't know a Snookie from a snooker table but we can imagine Mister and Missus Posasda no longer feel the need to pay for and maintain a substantial apartment in the Big Apple that listing information shows carries common charges and taxes that total $10,545 per month. Your Mama's bejeweled abacus calculates that comes to a pocketbook
draining $126,540 per year not counting the costly repairs that always
creep up, unnecessary but much desired improvements and, if there is
one to maintain, mortgage payments, not to mention the thousands spent each year on tipping the building staff during the holidays.

That may be entirely financially manageable for man like Mister Posada who in his last years as a Yankee earned well upwards of $13,000,000 a year (as well as some wordy jeers from articulate places) but as a retiree whose income will likely drop precipitiously—but no doubt remain substantial compared Average Joe and Middle Class Mindy—the downsizing of his real estate load is a prudent and savvy maneuver.

Like many Yankees, Mister and Missus Posada have long maintained a mansion in Florida, in Tampa where the Yankees do their pre-season spring training. Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter both have been to Flah-rih-duh gajillions of times but have
never set a toe in Tampa. In fact the only factoids
we know about Tampa is that it embraces the Gulf of Mexico with a giant and busy harbor, that actress Butterfly McQueen was born there, and it has long been the home base of the Home Shopping
Network.

Records indicate the couple acquired two acres in the upscale guard-gated enclave that winds through and around the Avila Golf and Country Club in Tampa, FL over the summer of 2001. It's not clear if Mister and Missus Posada custom-built their huge house in Tampa but the Hillsborough County Tax Man shows the existing residence wasn't built until 2003.

Mister and Missus Posada put their electronically gated Tampa estate on the market in early 2010 with an asking price of $7,250,000. Listing information we managed to cajole up out of the interweb shows the 2-story mock-Med mansion (shown above) measures 9,788 square feet and includes a total of 6 bedrooms, and 6 full and 2 half bathrooms.

The interior spaces include one of those ubiquitous impress-the-guests type foyers so often found in suburban mcmansions all across America, all the usual high ceiling formal entertaining spaces one expects in a near 10,000 square foot house plus vast informal family quarters that include a "state-of-the-art gourmet kitchen." The sprawling house also includes, as per listing information, a library, home theater, paneled game room with custom bar and wine cellar, a separate playroom for the kiddies and, natch, a fitness room attached to the expansive master suite.

The estate looks over the golf course—an maniacally manicured vista that does nothing for Your Mama but is quite desirable for many—and include a gated motor court, garage space for five cars, and a resort-style swimming pool and spa complex with deep sunbathing and dining terraces, a lagoon-style pool with shallow shelf entry, a pair of water slides and a Playboy-like grotto with with water fall and secluded spa designed, we imagine, with—ahem—privacy in mind.

The price for Mister and Missus Posada's Tampa digs eventually plummeted to $5,950,000 and property records show they finally unloaded their white elephant in early November (2011), after more than 600 days on the market, with a drastically lower sale price of $4,500,000.

Long before the Posadas sold their Tampa mansion property records reveal they'd already shelled out $6,250,000 to buy a significantly larger waterfront mansion on a much smaller .51 acre lot almost 300 miles away behind the guarded gates of the Old Cutler Bay community in the Miami bedroom community of Coral Gables. The recently completed mock-Med pile was once listed as high as $10,450,000 and measures, according to information we found on the interweb, more than 13,000 square feet with 8 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms and includes a water side negative edge swimming pool and private 70-foot dock for parking the family watercraft.

Nice apartment floor plan. I presume this is a building where you do not have to be vetted before you can own. As for the decor, the less said the better. Haut-vulgarity would describe it for me. Same for the Florida house.

For someone like Jorge, it's probably not just the fact that FL has no income tax. It's the weather, too. He grew up in the warmth of Puerto Rico. FL has a lot of the same warmth for a larger part of the year than elsewhere in the US. If he goes back home a lot, living in FL makes for a shorter plane ride to PR.